Does blogged peer review work?

Can the blogosphere work as well as the traditional peer review system? Over the past two months one researcher has been trying to linkurl:find out.;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54189/ Based on his and his publisher's early assessment of the experiment, using blog-based peer reviewing is only partially helpful, The Chronicle of Higher Education linkurl:reported;http://chronicle.com/free/2008/04/2332n.htm?rss today. The experiment was run by University of California, San Diego, com

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Can the blogosphere work as well as the traditional peer review system? Over the past two months one researcher has been trying to linkurl:find out.;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54189/ Based on his and his publisher's early assessment of the experiment, using blog-based peer reviewing is only partially helpful, The Chronicle of Higher Education linkurl:reported;http://chronicle.com/free/2008/04/2332n.htm?rss today. The experiment was run by University of California, San Diego, communications professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who, with his editors at MIT Press, decided to solicit blog-based peer review of a book manuscript on studying video games with software and media-studies. Wardrip-Fruin received more than 400 comments over the eight weeks that he posted segments of the book. He told The Scientist in an Email that he is still writing up his own assessment of the experiment. At first glance, he added, he was surprised that the blog comments aligned with recommendations made by three peer-reviewers obtained by MIT Press. Wardrip-Fruin told The Chronicle that the blog-based peer review was time consuming because he tried to respond to each comment so that it was more of a discussion. Surprisingly, bloggers were more critical than the experimenters thought they would be. Wardrip-Fruin's editor at MIT Press, Doug Sery, said that bloggers might have difficulty addressing larger themes in the book since they were only reading one section of the book at a time. Update: In response to The Chronicle's article, and this blog covering the project, Wardrip-Fruin wrote today on his blog, linkurl:Grand Text Auto,;http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/02/expressive-processing-review-a-question-of-goals/ that he had never intended the blog review to replace traditional peer review. He added that he considers the project a great success because it showed "what would take place in a blog-based form of review."
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